On Jan 18, 2010, at 12:56 PM, Stanislas Rusinsky wrote:

> Hi Terence, hi List,
> 
> 1) since you opened the door I would happily push once more the incremental 
> lexer and parser with hooks/callbacks/listener/whatever :). 

added to list. incr parsing is easy. incr lexing is hard. :(

> It is not a simple piece, but would be so much appreciated for IDE 
> integrations, the example that comes to my mind is Xtext: what a joy it would 
> be to be able to plug any antlr grammar as the base defintion for grammar 
> highlighting, autocompletion, etc. Could be useful for command line 
> autocompletion too! I'm just dreaming of a one grammar-does-it-all so there 
> is no more rewrite and duplication of purpose. I remember you once talked 
> about adding a pointer to the current position in the DFA with a state 
> attached in v3.
> 
> It would also require some work with the grammar actions, actions that would 
> they have their "reverse" counterpart, that could be undone if they maintain 
> a symbol table for example. The same for Init and after blocks.

Probably we'd limit it to building syntax trees.

> Incremental lexer/parser is also very good publicity, it is very much visible 
> to the "outside" world, Xtext gains a lot of traction thanks to that single 
> feature, it helps adoption.

Does it use the berkeley paper's algorithm for lexing?

> Here is a nice paper I found googling (in the even absolutely remote 
> possibility it might be of interest):
> http://www.google.be/search?q=General+Incremental+Lexical+Analysis+TIM+A.+WAGNER+and+SUSAN+L.+GRAHAM+University+of+California%2C+Berkeley&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
> ( http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/twagner-lexing.ps.gz )

i find it extremely complicated.

> 2) For what concerns the rewrite, I'm in favor of it, if you have the luxury 
> to do it the proper way, hell yeah!

:)

> Wish you fun in the process and thank you for lending an ear to external 
> inputs,

my pleasure.  it's going to be a really big undertaking.

Ter
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